PhD Positions in Deep Learning for Conversational AI, Speech Technologies, and Machine Learning for Sequencing at Concordia University, Canada.
We have several open PhD positions on deep learning for conversational AI, speech technologies, and more generally machine learning for sequence processing.
We expect the candidates to do research on deep learning topics such as self-supervised learning, cooperative deep learning, continual learning, multi-task learning, small-footprint models, graph neural networks, deep generative models, out-of-distribution generalization. Potential projects include, but are not limited to:
- Self-supervised representation learning for speech and audio.
- Conversational AI technologies that can be used in personal assistants.
- Speech enhancement and separation under real-life conditions.
- End-to-end speech based meeting analysis (speech diarization).
- Multi-task representation and metric learning for speech technologies.
- Life-long/continual learning for personal assistants.
- Deep generative models for speech/audio synthesis.
- Cooperative systems with graph neural networks.
- Deep learning for dialogue systems.
The students will be supervised by Prof. Mirco Ravanelli and will earn a doctorate degree in Computer Science from Concordia University (Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, part of the Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science).
About the supervisor
Dr. Mirco Ravanelli is an Assistant professor at Concordia University. He is also an Adjunct Professor at the Université de Montréal and Associate Member at the Mila-Quebec AI Institute. Dr. M. Ravanelli has been nominated vice-chair of the Technical Committee of Neural Networks and Computational Intelligence of The International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) for the period 2021-2023.
His main research interests are deep learning for sequence processing, with particular emphasis on Conversational AI. He is the author or co-author of more than 50 papers on these research topics.
Additionally, he worked as post-doc at the Mila-Quebec AI Institute under the supervision of the Turing’s award professor Yoshua Bengio. He received his Ph.D. (with cum laude distinction) from the University of Trento (Italy) in December 2017. Mirco is an active member of the speech and machine learning communities.
He is the founder and leader of the SpeechBrain project. The professor also received the IEEE CIS TETCI Outstanding Paper Award in 2021 and the IBM Best Student Paper Award at IEEE ICASSP in 2017. He was awarded the Best PhD in ICT at the University of Trento in 2018.
The students will also contribute to the popular SpeechBrain project.
About Montréal:
Montréal is a major global hub for artificial intelligence (AI) research and its AI ecosystem is growing very fast.
The city is home of several AI institutions such as the MILA-Quebec AI Institute, the Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO), and the Applied AI Institute at Concordia. Beyond being the incubator of many successful start-ups, many big companies have set up AI labs in Montreal as well, including Google, Samsung, Microsoft, IBM, Nuance, and Facebook.
Minimum required qualifications:
- Masters in CS, ECE, BME or a relevant field.
- Excellent background in machine learning and deep learning.
- Excellent programming skills (e.g. python, pytorch).
Equity and Diversity Statement:
We value equity and diversity. We strongly encourage women and applicants from racial, ethnic and gender minorities to apply for this position.
How to apply for the PhD Positions:
We invite the students to submit their application by sending their CVs to [email protected] as soon as possible. We expect students to start in fall 2022.
Useful Links:
– SpeechBrain: https://speechbrain.github.io/
– Concordia University: https://www.concordia.ca/
– Gina Cody School: https://www.concordia.ca/ginacody.html
– Prof. Mirco Ravanelli’s page: https://sites.google.com/site/mircoravanelli/
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